The era of easy profits is over, and the post-crypto Twitter era has begun

Original Title: Welcome to Post-CT

Original Author: Lauris, Multiplier

Original Translation: TechFlow, Deep Tide

Welcome to the "Post-Crypto Twitter" Era

The "Crypto Twitter" (CT) referred to here is the version of Crypto Twitter that acts as a market discovery and capital allocation engine, not the broader crypto community on Twitter as a whole.

"Post-Crypto Twitter" (Post-CT) does not mean the disappearance of discussion, but rather that Crypto Twitter, as a "coordination mechanism through discourse," is gradually losing its ability to repeatedly generate major market events.

If a single culture can no longer produce enough significant winners, it cannot continue to attract the next wave of new participants.

The "major market events" mentioned here are not situations like "a certain token tripled in price," but rather when the attention of most liquidity market participants is focused on the same thing. In this framework, Crypto Twitter used to be a mechanism that transformed public narratives into coordinated flows around a dominant meta-narrative. The significance of the "Post-Crypto Twitter" era is that this transformation mechanism is no longer reliably effective.

I'm not trying to predict what will happen next. To be honest, I don't have a clear answer. The focus of this article is to explain why the previous model worked, why it is declining, and what this means for how the crypto industry reorganizes itself.

Why Did Crypto Twitter Work?

Crypto Twitter (CT) was important because it compressed three market functions into one interface.

The first function of Crypto Twitter is narrative discovery. CT is a high-bandwidth salience mechanism. "Salience" is not just an academic way of saying "interesting," but a market term that refers to how the map converges on what is currently worth paying attention to.

In practice, Crypto Twitter created focal points of attention. It compressed a huge hypothesis space into a small set of "actionable right now" objects. This compression solved a coordination problem.

In more mechanical terms: Crypto Twitter turned scattered, private attention into visible, public common knowledge. If you see ten credible operators all discussing the same object, you not only know of its existence, but you know that others know, and you know that others know you know. In liquidity markets, this common knowledge is crucial.

As Herbert A. Simon said:

"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

The second function of Crypto Twitter is acting as a trust routing mechanism. In the crypto market, most assets do not have strong intrinsic value anchors in the short term. Therefore, capital cannot be allocated based solely on fundamentals, but instead flows through people, reputation, and ongoing signals. "Trust routing" is an informal infrastructure that determines whose claims can be believed early enough to have an impact.

This is not a mysterious phenomenon, but a rough reputation function continuously calculated in public by thousands of participants. People infer who are early entrants, who have good prior judgment, who have resource channels, and whose actions are associated with positive EV (Expected Value). This reputation layer makes capital allocation possible without formal due diligence, as it serves as a shortcut for choosing counterparties.

It is worth noting that Crypto Twitter's trust mechanism does not depend solely on "follower count." It is a combination of follower count, who follows you, the quality of replies, whether credible people interact with you, and whether your predictions stand up to reality. Crypto Twitter makes these signals easy to observe and at very low cost.

Crypto Twitter has both public trust and, over time, some communities have developed a tendency towards more private trust.

The third function of Crypto Twitter is to transform narrative into capital allocation through reflexivity. Reflexivity is the key to this core loop: narrative drives price, price validates narrative, validation attracts more attention, attention brings more buyers, and this loop self-reinforces until it collapses.

At this point, the market's microstructure comes into play. Narratives do not abstractly drive "the market," but drive order flow. If a large group is convinced by a narrative and believes an object is "key," marginal participants express this belief by buying.

When this loop is strong enough, the market temporarily rewards consensus-following behavior over deep analytical ability. In hindsight, Crypto Twitter was almost like a "low-IQ version of Bloomberg Terminal": a single information stream that fused salience, trust, and capital allocation.

Why Was the "Single Culture" Era Possible?

The "single culture" era existed because it had a repeatable structure. Each cycle revolved around an object simple enough for large groups to understand, yet broad enough to attract most of the ecosystem's attention and liquidity. I like to call these objects "toys."

"Toys" here is not pejorative, but a structural description. You can think of it as a game—easy to explain, easy to participate in, and inherently social (almost like an expansion pack for a massive multiplayer online role-playing game). A "toy" has a low participation threshold and high narrative compressibility; you can explain it to a friend in one sentence.

"Meta-narrative" (Meta) is the form a "toy" takes when it becomes a shared game board. Meta refers to the dominant set of strategies and the main object around which most participants gather. The power of a "single culture" is that this meta-narrative is not just "popular," but a shared game across users, developers, traders, and VCs. Everyone is playing the same game, just at different layers of the stack.

There was a great article written about the cyclical and changing nature of "trendy things," which is worth reading.

The market system we experienced required an "inefficiency window" that allowed people to quickly make "incredible wealth."

In the early stages of each cycle, the market was not fully efficient because the infrastructure for mass participation in the meta-narrative was not yet fully built. Opportunities existed, but the market's niche space was not yet fully filled. This is important because broad wealth accumulation requires a window for many participants to enter the market, rather than facing a hostile environment from the start.

As George Akerlof said in "The Market for Lemons":

"Asymmetric information between buyers and sellers leads the market away from efficiency."

The key is that for this system to work, you need to provide a highly efficient market for some people, while for others, the market is a typical "lemon market" (full of information asymmetry and inefficiency).

The single culture system also required a large-scale shared context, which Crypto Twitter (CT) provided. Shared context is rare on the internet because attention is usually fragmented. However, when a single culture forms, attention becomes concentrated. This concentration reduces coordination costs and amplifies the effects of reflexivity.

As F. A. Hayek said in "The Use of Knowledge in Society":

"The information we must make use of never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess."

In other words, the formation of shared context allows market participants to coordinate actions more efficiently, thus driving the prosperity and development of a single culture.

Why was the "single meta-narrative" so credible? When fundamentals have weak constraints on the market, salience becomes a more important constraint than valuation. The primary market question is not "What is it worth?" but "What are we all paying attention to? Is this trade already too crowded?"

A rough analogy is that mass culture used to focus attention on a few shared objects (like the same TV shows, chart-topping music, or celebrities). Now, attention is fragmented into various niches and subcultures, and people no longer share the same reference set at scale. Similarly, Crypto Twitter (CT) as a mechanism is undergoing a similar transformation: the top-level shared context is decreasing, while more localized contexts are emerging in smaller circles.

Why Is the "Post-Crypto Twitter" Era Arriving?

The emergence of "Post-Crypto Twitter" (Post-CT) is due to the gradual failure of the conditions that supported the "single culture."

The first failure is that "toys" are being cracked faster.

In previous cycles, the market learned the rules of the game and industrialized them. Once the rules are industrialized, the inefficiency window closes faster and lasts for a shorter time. As a result, the distribution of returns becomes more extreme: fewer winners and more structural losers.

Memecoins are a typical example of this dynamic. As an asset class, they work because of their low complexity and high reflexivity. However, this very feature makes memecoins easy to mass-produce. Once the production line matures, the meta-narrative becomes an assembly line.

As the market develops, the microstructure changes. The median participant is no longer trading against other ordinary people, but against the system. By the time they enter, information has been widely disseminated, liquidity pools have been "pre-seeded," trade paths optimized, insiders have positioned themselves, and even exit paths have been pre-calculated. In this environment, the median participant's expected return is compressed to a very low level.

In other words, most of the time, you simply become someone else's "exit liquidity."

A useful mental model is: early in the cycle, order flow is dominated by naive retail investors, while late in the cycle, order flow becomes increasingly adversarial and mechanized. The same "toy" evolves into a completely different game at different stages.

A single culture cannot persist if it cannot produce enough significant winners to attract the next wave of new participants.

The second failure is that value extraction overwhelms value creation.

"Extraction" here refers to actors and mechanisms that capture liquidity value rather than create new liquidity.

In the early stages of the cycle, new participants can add net liquidity and benefit from it, because the market's expansion outpaces the extraction layer's harvesting speed. However, in the later stages, new participants often become net contributors to the extraction layer. When this is widely recognized, market participation starts to decline. The decline in participation weakens the strength of the reflexivity loop.

This is also why market sentiment changes so consistently. If a market no longer provides broad, clear paths to winning, overall sentiment gradually deteriorates. In a market where the median participant's experience is "I'm just someone else's liquidity," cynicism is often rational.

To understand the overall market sentiment of current retail participants, you can refer to related posts.

The third failure is the fragmentation of attention. When no single object can attract the attention of the entire ecosystem, the market's "discovery layer" loses clear salience. Participants begin to split into narrower fields. This fragmentation is not only cultural but also has significant market consequences: liquidity is dispersed into different niches, price signals become less intuitive, and the dynamic of "everyone doing the same trade" disappears.

Additionally, there is a factor that should be briefly mentioned: macroeconomic conditions affect the strength of the reflexivity loop. The "single culture" era coincided with a period of strong global risk appetite and liquidity, making speculative reflexivity seem "normal." But when capital costs rise and marginal buyers become more cautious, narrative-driven capital flows are harder to sustain over the long term.

What Does "Post-Crypto Twitter" Mean?

"Post-Crypto Twitter" (Post-CT) refers to a new market environment in which Crypto Twitter is no longer the main coordination mechanism for capital allocation across the ecosystem, nor the core engine for on-chain markets to focus around a single meta-narrative (Meta).

In the "single culture" era, Crypto Twitter repeatedly and on a large scale linked narrative consensus with liquidity concentration. In the "Post-Crypto Twitter" era, this link becomes weaker and more intermittent. Crypto Twitter still serves as a discovery platform and reputation indicator, but it is no longer the reliable engine that synchronizes the entire ecosystem around "one trade," "one toy," or "one shared context."

In other words, Crypto Twitter can still generate narratives, but only a few narratives can be transformed into "common knowledge" at scale, and even fewer "common knowledge" narratives can be further transformed into synchronized order flow. When this transformation mechanism fails, even if there is still a lot of activity in the market, the overall feeling will seem "quieter."

This is also why the subjective experience has changed. The market now feels slower and more specialized because broad coordination has disappeared. The emotional shift is mainly a response to expected value (EV) conditions. The market's "quietness" does not mean there is no activity, but rather a lack of narratives and synchronized actions that can trigger global resonance.

The Evolution of Crypto Twitter: From Engine to Interface

Crypto Twitter (CT) will not disappear, but its function has changed.

In the early market system, Crypto Twitter was upstream of capital flows and to some extent determined the market's direction. In the current market system, Crypto Twitter is more like an "interface layer": it broadcasts reputation signals, surfaces narratives, and helps route trust, but actual capital allocation decisions increasingly occur in higher-trust "subgraphs."

These subgraphs are not mysterious. They are dense networks with higher information quality and frequent interaction among participants, such as small operator circles, domain-specific communities, private group chats, and inter-institutional discussion spaces. In this system, Crypto Twitter is more like a surface "front," while real social and trading activity happens in the underlying social network layer.

This also explains a common misconception: "Crypto Twitter is declining" usually actually means "Crypto Twitter is no longer the main place for ordinary participants to make money." Wealth now accumulates more in places with higher information quality, restricted access, and more private trust mechanisms, rather than through public, noisy trust computation.

Nevertheless, you can still achieve considerable returns by posting and building a personal brand on Crypto Twitter (some of my friends and nodes have done and are still doing this). But real value accumulation comes from building your social graph, becoming a trusted participant, and gaining more access to the "backstage layer."

In other words, surface-level brand building is still important, but the core competitive edge has shifted to building and participating in "backstage trust networks."

I Don't Know What Will Happen Next

I won't pretend I can accurately predict what the next "single culture" (Monoculture) will be. In fact, I'm skeptical that a "single culture" will form in the same way again, at least under current market conditions. The key is that the mechanisms that once fostered "single culture" have degraded.

My intuition may be somewhat subjective and contextual, as it is based on what I currently observe. However, these dynamics actually began to emerge earlier this year.

There are indeed some active areas at the moment, and listing the categories that attract attention is not difficult. But I won't mention these areas, as it doesn't substantively help the discussion. Overall, aside from presales and some initial allocations, the trend we now see is: the most overvalued categories are often those "adjacent" to Crypto Twitter (CT), rather than directly driven by CT itself.

Arguments

We have entered the "Post-Crypto Twitter" (Post-CT) era.

This is not because Crypto Twitter is "dead," nor because discussion has lost its meaning, but because the structural conditions supporting the repeated emergence of systemic "single culture" have been weakened. The game has become more efficient, value extraction mechanisms more mature, attention more fragmented, and the reflexivity loop has shifted from systemic to local.

The crypto industry continues, and Crypto Twitter still exists. My view is narrower: the era when Crypto Twitter could reliably coordinate the entire market into a shared meta-narrative and create broad, low-threshold nonlinear returns is, at least for now, over. Moreover, I believe the likelihood of this phenomenon reappearing in the next few years is significantly reduced.

This does not mean you can't make money, nor does it mean the crypto industry is over. This is neither a pessimistic view nor a cynical conclusion. In fact, I have never been more optimistic about the industry's future. My point is that the future market distribution and salience mechanisms will be fundamentally different from those of the past few years.

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